TITLE: The Kamea Chronicles, Part 2: Adjusting
AUTHOR: Sugah Sugah
SUMMARY: Kamea adjusts to life aboard Enterprise, while the crew adjusts to her presence. In short, there's a lot of adjusting going on. Hence the title.
SPOILERS: Through "Home" (season 4, episode 3)
RATING: T -- mostly language.AUTHOR'S NOTE: And now begins book two of the Kamea Chronicles, which follows the events of "The One and Only", so you might want to read that one first, just to get the idea of what's going on.I was going to take a day off from posting, but then I saw that "Enterprise" had been cancelled, and I had to put this up. TPTB are now high up on my list, right at the freaking top, and I'd just like to say that my "Enterprise" will continue indefinitely. BWA HA HA! Just try and get rid of me.That said, here we go with book two.EDIT: All books of the chronicles have been "updated" to include stardate, so you can follow the timeline of the series.

Disclaimer is in chapter 11, because I originally forgot it and didn't feel like changing it. But I can put it here, too.DISCLAIMER: I don't own "Enterprise". If I did, it never would've gotten cancelled and there would be a lot more scenes of Malcolm in decon.

The Kamea Chronicles

Part Two: Adjusting

Captain's Log:

Stardate: May 12, 2154

No one quite knows what to make of our guest. She's quite an enigma. T'Pol particularly is having trouble adjusting to her presence on board, but for the most part everyone seems to be avoiding her. According to Doctor Phlox, it is completely plausible that she is who she says she is, but I'd rather be safe than sorry, so I am attempting to access her medical records from Earth. I don't expect she'll be here very long -- just long enough to get her ship back in working order -- but until then, I've decided to extend her every courtesy. She is a guest, after all.

Three days had passed since Captain Archer had extended an invitation to Kamea to remain on Enterprise -if "invitation" could even be considered an appropriate term -and she had spent the majority of those three days holed up in her quarters. It wasn't her first choice; she wanted to explore the ship, see the engines, and go to the launch bay to start repairing her shuttle pod. After spending almost a month in the confines of her small ship, the last thing she wanted was to be cooped up again. But whenever she stepped out of her room, she was greeted with stares from most of the crew.

She recalled the captain's announcement, which he'd made that same night he came to her quarters.

"Kamea is a guest aboard Enterprise, and I expect her to be treated with the same respect and courtesy you would show to any visitor to our ship. We must do everything we can to make her feel welcome."

Well, it certainly is eerily reminiscent of home, she thought grimly, though that was hardly comforting. People skirted around her in the corridors, and when they thought she was out of earshot, they would whisper about her to their companions, obviously forgetting that her ears were more sensitive than theirs. She remained in her quarters as much as possible, leaving only for meals, which she ate alone. And she had not yet discovered how to work the beverage dispenser, and no one attempted to show her, so she ate quickly and returned to her room for a glass of water.

The whole situation was enough to make anyone crazy, but it should not have bothered Kamea. She should have been used to it. Most of her freshman year at MIT had passed the same way, until the other students got to know her and realized that she was actually a pretty decent person underneath the stoic Vulcan façade. She'd been denied entrance into the Starfleet Academy twenty-four years straight because the board couldn't see past her Vulcan exterior. She'd had to pretend to be human just to get a halfway decent job. However, it had been years since she'd had to deal with outright uneasiness.

It did bother her, though. Just because she was used to it didn't mean it didn't affect her. Why were people so apprehensive around her? She at first thought it was because she was half-Vulcan, but Commander T'Pol was a full Vulcan and a member of the crew, so she knew that that couldn't be the reason. However, the newer members of the crew - the ones who weren't use to working with Vulcans on a daily basis - were probably at the core of the whole problem. From the little snippets of conversation she'd managed to overhear in the corridors, xenophobia on Earth had reached an all-time high after the Xindi conflict. Most humans weren't very trusting toward alien species, and the Vulcans hadn't done much to help matters.

Kamea gritted her teeth at the thought. Of all the species her parents could have been, and they had to be species that despised each other. She had never been completely accepted by either one. High school had been tolerable because no one knew of her Vulcan heritage, and by the time they found out, they knew her too well to resent her for being Vulcan; they did, however, become angry at her deception, but she supposed that was to be expected.

She had, of course, considered that perhaps the crew was wary of her abilities. She suspected that the captain had not made that bit of information common knowledge, but she knew all too well how fast gossip traveled, especially in places as confined as a starship. Besides, a number of people had been present when the captain questioned her. Any one of them could have passed the information along.

She spent her first two days on Enterprise re-reading her way through her collection of books, but after she'd read Fahrenheit 451 twice, she decided it was time to stop hiding and start assimilating. Who knew how long she'd be aboard Enterprise? Did she really want to remain shut up in her quarters for the duration of her stay?

The answer was a definitive "no". Why did she care what these people thought about her? The idea of scrutiny had never bothered her before; she had never been ashamed of her heritage. She closed the book with a snap, tossed it aside, and left the room.

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